Let us now harken back, if you will, all the way to those heady days of the spring of 2014. Val Kilmer was the Ice Man, college dorm rooms were grooving to the sounds of Peter Gabriel’s So and the entire country was soon to be mesmerized by the baby stuck in a well.

Wait, that was 1986. Sorry, it just seems so long ago that we were being told how Xiaomi was going to kill Apple in China, the United States and, eventually, the off-world colonies. Because it’s just obvious that everyone wants cheap phones and they care about literally nothing else. This much we can all agree on.

Or, well, the Motley Fool’s Chris Neiger who called Xiaomi “the real iPhone killer” could agree on it. The Macalope and others pointed out several times that Samsung was more likely to suffer than Apple because of Xiaomi’s ascendancy because Apple didn’t compete at the low end of the market. Sure enough, that’s how it played out. Who saw that coming?

Apple reported its quarterly financial results this week, breaking out more detail that almost all of its competitors, but it failed to report specific Apple Watch unit sales and that makes pundits so mad.

Apple announced its quarterly results this week and it’s like waking up to Sonny and Cher singing “I’ve got you, babe!” Despite selling a ridiculous number of iPhones, Apple didn’t sell enough according to Wall Street because analysts thought they’d sell even more iPhones. 35 percent growth is apparently not enough to feed the maw of the mindless beast that controls our economy.

Let’s go to Bloomberg for the most on-point explanation of the quarterly failure to appease the Gods by jumping into this lava pit of the vanities. To be honest, there are at least a dozen pieces that are about as bad. The only reason the Macalope picked Bloomberg is, well, someone has to pay.